Forget me not: Spotify users can take a chance on never-heard music with Forgotify

Compiled by Herb Scribner , Deseret News National Edition

Published: Friday, Jan. 31 2014 1:25 p.m. MST

An Associated Press reporter demonstrates Spotify during a product review in San Francisco, Tuesday, July 19, 2011. Spotify is an online streaming music service which made its U.S. debut last week. Forgotify is a new app that gives users the opportunity to hear music that's never been played on the service before. (Jeff Chiu, Associated Press)

Even forgotten songs need a streaming application.

A group from California is trying to give those songs a chance, The Washington Post reported. Using songs from Spotify, the online music streaming application that allows users to listen to hours of free music with few to no ads, the group has launched a new feature — Forgotify, which allows users to hear music that has never been listened to before.

The mission is simple. As stated on the app’s website, “Four million songs on Spotify have never been played. Not even once. Let’s change that.”

Listening to all those songs isn’t out of the realm of possibility. “If we draw on the well-worn three-minute pop song cliché, that means it’ll take 200,000 people, listening one hour each, to make it through the whole catalog. Not so impossible, actually!” wrote Caitlin Dewey for The Post.

On clicking the “start listening” button on the Forgotify page, users will be taken right to a new song that’s never been heard before and given the option to listen. If it doesn’t suit the user, he can skip the song to try a new one.

Forgotify is a fun experiment, Dewey wrote.

“I’m personally getting really into 85-year-old M.S. Viswanathan, apparently a prolific Kollywood composer,” wrote Dewey. “I have no idea what any of the lyrics are, of course, but this is pretty fun.”

But is this new feature all it's cracked up to be? TechCrunch writer Greg Kumparak said Spotify’s content isn’t always top quality, so users might run into some poor music choices while using Forgotify.

“Of course, there’s probably a reason that most of these tracks have zero plays,” Kumparak said. “Spotify isn’t necessarily known for setting the bar to entry very high, so a number of these tunes sound like amateur covers of a KidzBop cover that was, itself, based on a rough recollection of a song given by someone who’d heard it once, years ago. That is to say, most are not very good.”

And Kumparak points out that Forgotify will invariably end itself, as the feature is supposed to be about listening to songs that don’t get hits. But once they do get hits, that list of forgotten songs shortens, Kumparak wrote.

“If the rate at which people are using Forgotify exceeds the rate at which Spotify adds new tracks, Forgotify is theoretically eating itself with each new listen,” Kumparak wrote.

There’s no telling how this new feature will do. But for the people behind Forgotify, it’s likely they won’t want to see their new application forgotten too quickly.